My Daughter and I love to go to the cinema. It is our go-to for our Daddy/Daughter date night. After the film, we will talk for hours over burgers and chips discussing the subtle nuances of our most recent film. In fact, our discussions often continue for days on this subject until we have begun to explore new ways of telling the same story and delved into fresh ideas about the meaning of the film and the intentions of the creators.
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| ZamZamma in front of the Lahore Museum (Author's collection, copyright 2019) |
I was recently in Lahore Pakistan and no visit there is complete without a stop at the Zamzamma and the Wonder House, in front of which it stands. These terms are, of course, from Rudyard Kipling's Kim and like every twelve year old boy prior to the eighties, I spent some of my time buried in the pages of that amazing book. So, while I was at the Wonder House last week, I purchased a copy of Kim as an homage to a writer whose works helped shape my outlook on life. Through those pages, I was delighted to, again, travel by te-rain through India and pursue Russians through the high passes of Afghanistan.
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| The facade of the Wonder House, Lahore (Author's collection, copyright 2019) |
The strange thing is that as I read the story for the first time in decades, I saw things from my adult perspective - not that of a twelve year-old boy who had never left the farm. Here was a story I hadn't read before. A story of intestinal fortitude and intrigue as its own reward that could have been placed anywhere in the last twenty years of the Wars on Terror. The boyish fantasy which I remember was still there, but I didn't remember the extent of deep underlying foreboding and impending doom, as well as the heavy emphasis placed on personality assessment and exploitation. I started to realise the depth of the storyline in this book and, over the course of the week, my internal monologue about this book started to sound like the post-film discussions I have had with my Daughter all her life. Somewhere around 0230 yesterday, I realised that Kim was the fore-runner of the Disney-Pixar films. These films have delighted families since 1995 by providing relevant, multi-dimensional entertainment for the entire family. Children and parents alike were excited to go to these films because there was something in them for all and, in the end, there were hours of conversation stimulated by the cinematic experience.
That is exactly what Kipling did with Kim. Families discussed their interpretations of the subject matter because India is a foreign land to most Westerners; not to mention the unique and nebulous nature of the Great Game. At the end of all this ruminating, I realised that Disney-Pixar - though incredibly talented and creative as a group - wasn't as innovative as I thought they were all those years ago. They merely employed an age-old, proven technique for mass entertainment that had not been used for some time, so the novelty was palpable. Rudyard Kipling made great use of this one hundred years before Disney in his timeless classic, Kim, as it is a vibrant and riveting story for children of any age that explores and challenges the instincts of us all.
